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Lemon Tincture for Flavouring
Pare the lemons quite thin and cover the shavings of the yellow rind with good grain-alcohol. Cork tight. When ready for use the alcohol will be bright yellow. This should then be poured off into a second bottle from which it is to be used.
LEMON SUGAR FOR FLAVOURING (Or "Zest") Rub lumps of sugar over lemon rind until the oil cells are broken, when the oil will be absorbed by the sugar. Place the sugar in an air-tight jar and it will be ready for dissolving at any time.
Two flavourings from the same fruit, both of which trade on the fact that lemon oil lives entirely in the coloured outer rind. The original gives no quantities, so treat the proportions below as a working starting point.
- The hinge: no white pith"Pare quite thin" is the whole instruction. Any white pith carried along turns the tincture bitter and cloudy, and bitterness is the one fault you cannot correct later. A vegetable peeler held at a shallow angle, or a zester, gets the coloured layer and nothing else.
- "Good grain-alcohol"This means neutral spirit at high proof — 190-proof Everclear is the modern equivalent, and it extracts the oils fastest. Where that is not sold, 100-proof vodka works; 80-proof works more slowly and gives a weaker tincture. Do not substitute rubbing alcohol or any denatured spirit, which is not food.
- Proportions and timeThe peel of 4 to 6 lemons to 1 cup of spirit gives a strong flavouring. The recipe's cue is visual — wait until the liquid is bright yellow and the peel has gone pale and leathery, usually one to two weeks at room temperature, out of direct light. Shake it when you think of it.
- Why decantPouring the strained tincture into a second bottle is not fussiness. Peel left sitting in spirit eventually gives up bitter compounds along with the oil, so straining stops the extraction where you want it. Kept corked tight, the tincture holds its flavour for a year or more.
- Modern lemons are waxedSupermarket fruit carries a food-grade wax and often a fungicide, both of which sit exactly where the oil is. Scrub under warm water and dry well, or buy unwaxed or organic lemons for anything that uses the rind.
- The lemon sugarUse hard cube or lump sugar, not granulated — the point is a firm abrasive edge to rupture the oil cells. Rub until the cube is yellow and damp, then set it aside and take a fresh one. The sugar will cake in the jar; break it up with a spoon before dissolving, and use it within a couple of months, as the oil fades.
- How much to useThe tincture's strength depends on how much peel went in and how long it steeped, so it will not match commercial lemon extract measure for measure. Start with half a teaspoon where a recipe calls for a teaspoon of extract, and taste. The sugar is measured as sugar, replacing part of what the recipe already calls for.
Alcoholic tinctures and oiled sugars were two standard ways of capturing citrus flavour in a household kitchen before bottled extracts became cheap and reliable, and both appear in English and American cookery books through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The logic is straightforward: lemon oil is not water-soluble, so a cook who wants the perfume rather than the acid must dissolve it into spirit or trap it in sugar. The word zest here appears to be used for the flavouring preparation itself rather than for grated peel, which is what a modern recipe means by the term.